Founded in
1999,
the New America Foundation (NAF) is a public-policy think tank
headquartered in Washington, DC, with a sister office in Sacramento,
California. NAF's mission
is to “invest” in individuals and programs that have the capacity to
influence public policy outside of “party politics.” To this end,
NAF is concerned with seeding its ideas into the domain of public
discourse, primarily through media outreach, policy papers (which
may be used by officials to inform actual policy decisions), and
public information events. As a corollary to this objective, NAF
seeks to cultivate a new generation of policy leaders sympathetic to
the NAF philosophy.

NAF’s leadership claims to represent the values of “the radical
center,” a designation which NAF founder Ted Halstead and NAF fellow
Michael Lind define in their book bearing that title. Writing in
Salon magazine, Lind
describes this “center radical” position as an "economic
program" representing "an implicit repudiation of the center-right
neoliberalism symbolized by Bill
Clinton, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers." "Our goal," adds Lind,
"[is] not to repeal the New Deal [of Franklin Roosevelt] but to
adapt it to the circumstances of the 21st century." Also integral to
the NAF program, Lind and Halstead claim, is an
effort to
transcend the Right vs. Left paradigm that typically pits
conservatives against leftists.

Halstead, who also founded the progressive think tank Redefining
Progress, explains that NAF
aims to serve as
a “content provider” for the media. He has written extensively for
The Washington Post and The New York Times, among
other publications.

NAF’s current president,
Steve Coll,
is a former managing editor of The Washington Post and
currently serves as a contributor for The New Yorker
magazine. Many other NAF board members and staffers are associated
with mainstream news outlets as well (see below). In addition, NAF
staff and fellows frequently write for such publications as
Foreign Policy, Prospect, The National,
The Atlantic Monthly, TheLos Angeles Daily News,
Salon, Politico, The Fiscal Times,
Haaretz,
Rolling Stone, Slate, The Christian Science
Monitor, and numerous others.

Since its early days, NAF has established vital associations with
the computer technology industry. NAF board chairman
Eric Schmidt,
for instance, is the CEO of Google, Inc. Numerous NAF board
members and funders are giants of Silicon Valley. Some are members
of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), whose senior fellow
Russell Mead played a role in NAF’s founding. Among the more notable
NAF board members are the following (full list
here):

David Bradley, chairman and owner of the Atlantic Media
Company and a member of the CFR

James Fallows, a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly
and former editor of U.S. News and World Report

Dr. Atul A. Gawande, former Clinton administration health-policy advisor, staff member
of The New Yorker magazine, and director for the World
Health Organization

Rita Hauser, founder of the Hauser Foundation, who has
ties to the
Palestinian Authority

Laurene Powell Jobs, wife of Apple CEO Steve Jobs

Kati Marton, former chair of the International Women’s
Health Coalition, board member of the International Rescue
Committee and Human Rights Watch, member of the CFR, and faculty member at
Al Quds University (a Palestinian school in East Jerusalem)

Richard Medley, a former partner, managing director, and
chief political advisor of
Soros Fund Management

Daniel Yergin, the only foreign member of the Russian
Academy of Oil and Gas, and a trustee of the
Brookings Institution

Fareed Zakaria, host for CNN, editor of NewsweekInternational, and columnist for Newsweek and
The Washington Post

Steven Clemons, board member of the Carnegie Council on
Ethics and International Affairs

Mark Schmitt, former director of policy and research for
U.S. Programs at the
Open Society Institute and a current board member of the
Proteus Fund

Parag Khanna, member of the Council on Foreign Relations,
former fellow at the Brookings Institution, and former foreign policy advisor to
the "Barack
Obama for President" campaign in 2008

Daniel Levy, director of the Prospects for Peace Initiative
at the
Century Foundation and co-founder of
J Street.

NAF oversees numerous programs and
initiatives
designed to influence public opinion on particularized topics. These
programs typically disseminate their ideas via policy papers, media
articles, books, and NAF-sponsored events. Among NAF's more
significant programs are the following:

Health Policy Program: NAF
approved of the the 2010
federal healthcare overhaul bill because: (a) it would “offer a
new image” of how Americans view dying; and (b) it would help
"patients and their families to recognize" that: "[S]ometimes ‘doing
everything’ results in more burden than benefit. High-tech medicine
can prolong life, but for some patients, it merely draws out the
process of dying." In 2009, Health Policy Program director Len
Nichols
testified before Congress in support of a
public health-insurance option.

Energy Policy Initiative: NAF
advocates punitive taxation on the use of fossil fuels, for the
purpose of forcing Americans to cut back their reliance on such
energy sources. In 2010, NAF produced a policy paper in favor of
implementing a “Smart
Grid,” a government-controlled energy use/delivery system.

Global Governance Initiative: The director of this program,
Parag Khanna,
contends that global governance is inevitable and that, in fact,
America has already embarked on an unalterable course toward this
destination. According to Khanna, the world at large sits on the
precipice of an epoch that will be marked by “fear, uncertainty,
plagues, and violence,” which global governance will ultimately
relieve. Khanna lauds
the efforts of "postmodern Medicis such as
Bill Gates,
Anil Ambani,
George Soros, and
Richard
Branson," who "take it upon themselves" to “cure pandemics, run
corporate cities, undermine authoritarian regimes, and sponsor
climate-saving research.”

Middle East Task Force: NAF’s Middle East Task Force is
highly critical of Israel and sympathetic toward Palestinian Arabs,
whose anti-Israel activities allegedly "emulate
the civil rights struggle [of blacks] in the United States and the
struggle against apartheid in South Africa."
Advancing the notion that the Israeli government is “occupying”
Palestinian lands, NAF has called for U.S. sanctions against the
Jewish State.

NAF receives funding
from the following foundations, organizations, and individuals: the
Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, the
Carnegie Corporation of New York, the CIGNA Foundation, the
Colombe Foundation, the
Nathan Cummings Foundation, the Dancing Tides Foundation, the
Ettinger Foundation, the Exxon-Mobil Corporation, the
Ford Foundation, the Foundation for Child Development, the
Foundation to Promote Open Society, the
Fourth Freedom Forum,
Free Press, the
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google Inc., the Evelyn &
Walter Haas Jr. Fund, the Hauser Foundation, the
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, H&R Block, Intel
Corporation, the James Irvine Foundation, the Japan Bank for
International Cooperation, the John S. and James L. Knight
Foundation, the
Liberty Hill Foundation, the Lockheed Martin Corporation,
McKinsey & Company Inc., the Microsoft Corporation, the
Open Society Institute,
Pew Charitable Trusts, the
Ploughshares Fund, the
Proteus Fund, the
Public Welfare Foundation, the Christopher Reynolds Foundation,
the
Rockefeller Foundation, the
Samuel Rubin Foundation,
Save the Children, Wendy and Eric Schmidt, Bernard L. and Irene
Schwartz, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the Alfred P.
Sloan Foundation, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, the Levi
Strauss Foundation, the
Surdna Foundation, and the George Wasserman Family Foundation.

In addition, NAF has created a “Leadership Council” composed of
individuals who have donated $25,000 or more to the organization.
Among these luminaries are Neal Baer, executive producer of the
television program Law & Order: Special Victims Unit; Craig
Newmark, founder of CraigsList.org; and Jonathan Soros, president of
Soros Fund Management and the son of George Soros.